The CIA Spy Who Viewed Life On Mars

On May 22nd, 1984, a highly specialized CIA operative reported for duty to a small room deep within Fort Meade, Maryland. He sits down at a desk, across from his partner, and closes his eyes. A sealed envelope sits on the desk between them. After a quick prompt, the man begins describing images: a large yellowish pyramid, sitting in some sort of depression- the environment was ravaged by an unknown geologic event- if there was any life in this place, it seems to have disappeared a long time ago.

His partner instructs him to go back to a time before the catastrophic event. Eyes still closed, he struggles to describe megalithic structures, smooth and architecturally exacting- he still sees no living presence, but only what he describes as “the shadow of people, very tall… thin. It’s as if they were there and they’re not there anymore.” “Go back to a period of time when they are there,” his partner says.

From here, the man describes an enormous obelisk, strange intersecting roads and aqueducts, more pyramids, and other extraordinary structures. He eventually locates the tall, thin beings sleeping within one of the pyramids. Surprisingly, he is able to communicate with them. “They’re ancient people… they’re dying, it’s past their time.”

He tells a fragmented story describing the destruction of the tall beings’ environment- which somehow involves a comet or similar cosmic event. A small group of them went off to find a new place to live, as their current planet has become uninhabitable. The being sleeping in the pyramid is waiting for the search party to return, hopeful they might find a suitable new planet to call home.

For roughly an hour, the CIA operative explores this strange alien world through closed eyes. He has participated in hundreds of similar viewings, though typically, his targets are of the more terrestrial sort- clandestine military bases, submarines, and other matters of national security. When the experiment is over- the man opens his eyes, and his partner opens the sealed envelope on the desk. Inside is a sheet of paper describing the target he had been psychically viewing. It simply read, “The Planet Mars – Time of Interest, approximately 1 million years B.C.”

At the height of the Cold War, US and Russian intelligence agencies were embroiled in a perpetual game of one-upsmanship- obsessed with addressing gaps in their military capabilities. This led to a number of official government programs that sound like plot elements from a sci-fi novel, including the now declassified Project Stargate. US intelligence had discovered the Russians were developing a psychic spy program. While skeptical that such a thing might be possible, the CIA was intrigued enough to bankroll a nascent program of their own- enlisting the help of researchers Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ at Stanford Research Institute.

The two accomplished men were no strangers to the paranormal- in fact they had been lobbying the CIA for years to help sponsor research into psychic powers. Enlisting known psychics to launch their study, the experiments at SRI aimed to produce a set of repeatable protocols for their operations- it was their belief that all humans possess an innate set of psychic abilities, and with the right training, literally anyone can be turned into a psychic spy. One of SRI’s early test subjects came up with the term “remote viewing” to describe the procedures they were developing. Puthoff and Targ liked the term, primarily because it felt free of paranormal or occult associations.

The protocols developed at SRI would provide the foundation for the official CIA program, named Project Stargate. The main operations center moved to a shabby, leaky building within Fort Meade, where remote viewers would assist various intelligence agencies for the next 20 years.

The remote viewing process is relatively simple. A disclosed CIA document from 1986 describes the protocols in depth: In addition to the actual viewer, remote viewing requires a monitor and a target. The monitor tracks the progress of the session and questions the viewer for details. The target is determined before the session begins, by someone not otherwise directly involved in the operation. The viewer clears their mind as completely as possible, and the monitor proceeds to prompt them with a unique, but non-descriptive feature of the target- such as longitude and latitude coordinates.

The impressions received by the viewer are typically foggy and indistinct. Experienced viewers know that accurate impressions come from the subconscious mind. Shutting down the conscious mind is the most important, and most difficult, part of remote viewing. Curiously, it seems as if time is not a factor in the viewing process. By all accounts, remote viewing the past is no more difficult than viewing the present.

One important mechanism in the remote viewing protocols developed at SRI is the use of feedback. It is ideal for the viewer to have some means of confirming the results of their session. For remote viewers in training, immediate feedback provides an excellent learning opportunity, as they can instantly evaluate whether or not their viewing was accurate.

While the 1984 viewing of Mars remains quite impossible to confirm, a related experiment executed 10 years prior, was designed to view the far reaches of our solar system with measurable, legitimate feedback. In 1973, NASA launched a probe to acquire the first ever close-up images of Jupiter. At the same time, a psychic phenom by the name of Ingo Swann was working with the CIA-funded experiment at SRI. Swann was growing bored of his work- routinely tasked with viewing mundane targets in nearby rooms or across town. When he heard news of the Jupiter mission, he recognized a unique opportunity to view a distant target with subsequent feedback he could use to measure the accuracy of his viewing.

One Saturday in April of 1973, 5 months before any data would come back from the NASA mission, Swann sat for a viewing session. He identified 13 unique observations of Jupiter, including the presence of rings, a dominant orange color, a hydrogen mantle, strong tornadoes and storms, and water in its atmosphere. None of these phenomena were scientifically recognized at the time of his viewing, yet all 13 distinct features recorded by Swann were confirmed over the next 20 years.

This was not Swann’s only journey off-planet. He would repeatedly visit the moon, and his descriptions of the activity on Earth’s satellite are utterly fantastic. In his first viewing of the moon’s dark side, Swann witnessed an enormous tower, reminiscent of the United Nations Secretariat Building, but much larger. He claimed the tower was built by extraterrestrials. In later viewings of the same location, he would describe advanced mining operations, a massive network of structures, and advanced machinery. In short, it seemed as if someone had built a base on the dark side of the moon. With increased focus, Swann was able to see beings dwelling within the side of a cliff- unlike the tall, thin martians, these moon creatures appeared 100% human. Curiously, they were all entirely naked.

While the off-planet adventures of remote viewers are certainly intriguing, their track record for success in relatively more mundane efforts is no less impressive. Joseph McMoneagle, the viewer who peered into the ancient history of Mars, was one of the first recruits in Project Stargate, beginning his service in 1978, and remaining an adviser to the program until its official demise in 1995. McMoneagle built an extraordinary resume of successful viewings, including locating a previously unknown Soviet submarine months before its existence was confirmed by military satellites. He and his team were also instrumental in providing intelligence on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979.

Ultimately, McMoneagle claimed the CIA program had a 30% success rate of accurate viewings. While this number may seem low, those in favor of the psychic program touted that percentage as an incredible achievement. As McMoneagle said “Thirty percent is batting .300 — you have to understand, that’s very good in the world of intelligence.”

Project Stargate ran for 20 years, and the remote viewers were employed at various times by every branch of US intelligence operations, despite an insistence by government officials that the program never worked. Of course, those who participated in the project will tell a very different tale. As McMoneagle points out, the program needed to apply to renew their funding every year. Why would the government continue to invest for 20 years in a program it insisted didn’t produce results? McMoneagle claims that in spite of the program’s success, no one in the intelligence community was willing to be associated with the controversial project. As he said, “Everybody wanted to use it, but nobody wanted to be caught dead standing next to it. There’s an automatic ridicule factor. ‘Oh, yeah, psychics.’ Anybody associated with it could kiss their career goodbye.”

Today, 20 years after the end of Project Stargate, most of the CIA’s own documentation on the project is freely viewable in the reading room section of their website, Cia.gov. While there is no official government program continuing to employ psychic techniques, ex-Stargate operatives have been known to subcontract for various intelligence services to this day.

In general, psychic research is met with harsh skepticism, even derision, despite decades of studies proving that psychic abilities, while fallible and never accurate 100% of the time, certainly do exist. But how likely is it that Mars was inhabited 1 million years ago by tall beings sleeping in pyramids after their planet was devastated by a cosmic collision? What are the chances that the dark side of the moon is home to a sophisticated mining operation, staffed entirely by a colony of nudists?

Joseph McMoneagle, by his own figures, would probably say around 30%.